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What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored
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What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored Paperback - 2014

by Bernard Harrison


From the publisher

How can literature, which consists of nothing more than the description of imaginary events and situations, offer any insight into the workings of "human reality" or "the human condition"? Can mere words illuminate something that we call "reality"? Bernard Harrison answers these questions in this profoundly original work that seeks to re-enfranchise reality in the realms of art and discourse. In an ambitious account of the relationship between literature and cognition, he seeks to show how literary fiction, by deploying words against a background of imagined circumstances, allows us to focus on the roots, in social practice, of the meanings by which we represent our world and ourselves. Engaging with philosophers and theorists as diverse as Wittgenstein, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, Derrida, F. R. Leavis, Cleanth Brooks, and Stanley Fish, and illustrating his ideas through readings of works by Swift, Woolf, Appelfeld, and Dickens, among others, this book presents a systematic defense of humanism in literary studies, and of the study of the Humanities more generally, by a distinguished scholar.

Details

  • Title What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored
  • Author Bernard Harrison
  • Binding Paperback
  • Pages 620
  • Volumes 1
  • Language ENG
  • Publisher Indiana University Press, Bloomington
  • Date 2014-12-29
  • ISBN 9780253014085 / 0253014085
  • Weight 1.99 lbs (0.90 kg)
  • Dimensions 9 x 6 x 1.38 in (22.86 x 15.24 x 3.51 cm)
  • Library of Congress subjects Fiction - History and criticism - Theory, etc, LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory
  • Library of Congress Catalog Number 2014027036
  • Dewey Decimal Code 809

Media reviews

Citations

  • Choice, 09/01/2015, Page 0

About the author

Bernard Harrison is Emeritus E. E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah and Emeritus Professor in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Sussex, UK. He is author of Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory; The Resurgence of Anti-Semitism: Jews, Israel, and Liberal Opinion; and (with Patricia Hanna) Word and World: Practice and the Foundations of Language.

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What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored
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What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored

by Harrison, Bernard

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What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored

by Bernard Harrison

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What Is Fiction For? – Literary Humanism Restored
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What Is Fiction For? – Literary Humanism Restored

by Harrison, Bernard

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9780253014085
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0253014085
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What Is Fiction For? – Literary Humanism Restored
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What Is Fiction For? – Literary Humanism Restored

by Harrison, Bernard

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What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored

What Is Fiction For?: Literary Humanism Restored

by Bernard Harrison

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What is Fiction for?
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What is Fiction for?

by Bernard Harrison

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